1829- Giacomo’s Opera Guglielmo Tell debuted in Paris. The
William Tell overture was heard for the first time- Hi Ho Silver!

1887- Thomas Edison patented the plans for a Kinetoscope,
his original version of Motion Pictures using George Eastmans new celluloid
roll film. Most of the actual work was done by Canadian scientist W.K.L.
Dickson. He drove himself sick designing, building and improving the device as
well as the camera and studio, but Edison took all the credit. Edison wrote
Edweard Muybridge at the time that he doubted the Kinetoscope would have much
commercial value beyond the science lab.

1928- In Berlin the ThreePenny Opera premiered, music by
Kurt Weill and lyrics by Bertholdt Brecht with Lotte Lenya as Pirate Jenny. Mackie
Messer or Mack the Knife was born.

1930 -Detroit radio station is 1st
to broadcast a news program on the air.

1935- Disney cartoon Plutos’ Judgement Day.

1938- Walt Disney puts ten thousand down to buy 51 acres on
Buena Vista Street in Burbank. He would build his modern studio there.

1946- Looney
Toon short 'Walky Talky Hawky' the first Foghorn Leghorn. The character was
based on a Fred Allen radio character Senator Beauregard Claghorn, that mocked
bombastic Southern conservative congressmen.

1948- Disney's 'Melody Time' premiered.

1948- Movie star Robert Mitchum was busted for smoking pot
with a blonde in the Hollywood Hills. This would have normally smoked his
career but the new postwar outlaw, noir attitude was in vogue. So bad-boy
Mitchum emerged from county jail more popular than ever. When asked what he
thought of being in jail, he said it's not much different than being
free....but you meet a better clientele of people IN jail.

1964- Young comedian Richard Pryor
made his first appearance on TV. He did some of his standup on Rudy Vallee’s
Broadway Tonight Show.

1867- At the University of
Göttingen, Albert Niemann isolated the chemical elements of the Columbian coca
plant and names the powdery substance Cocaine.

1935- “Top Hat” starring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers
premiered.

1936- First newspaper comic strip entirely devoted to Donald
Duck.

1939- The last peacetime voyage of the HMS Queen Mary
evacuated Americans fleeing the impending war in Europe. Among the crowd was a
large contingent of Hollywood stars like Bob Hope and Jack Warner who planned
to attend the first Cannes Film Festival (postponed until 1946). The Queen Mary
kept radio silence across the ocean to hide from U-Boats. This was a wise
because her sister ship HMS Athenia was torpedoed.

1968- The first 7-11 store opened in Palmdale California.
Have a Slurpee !

1975- Ralph Bakshi's film "Coonskin". Bad boy
Bakshi's portrayal of African-American urban violence was deemed so offensive
that it caused the first riot ever at the Museum of Modern Art, and died at the
boxoffice. The film was retitled on video "Streetfight".

When Ralph resurfaced he turned his attention to Sword &
Fantasy films.

1980- Willie Nelson released his hit“On the Road Again.”

1993-The David Letterman Show
premiered on CBS. Letterman was wooed away from NBC for $42 million bucks.

2012- At the Republican
Presidential convention, venerable 80 year old filmmaker Clint Eastwood made a
fool out of himself by improvising a rambling dialogue with an empty chair that
he meant to be the absent Pres. Obama. Eastwood was supposed to introduce
candidate Mitt Romney’s acceptance speech, but his bizarre performance upstaged
anything Romney said. This followed the keynote speech by New Jersey governor
Chris Christie, who talked only about himself for 16 minutes before he ever
mentioned Romney.For this and many
other reasons, Romney lost by a landslide.

1850- Lohengrin, the first opera
written by Richard Wagner, premiered in Weimar. The Third Act chorus “Treulich
Gefuhrt” became famous for weddings as “Here Comes the Bride, All Dressed in
White”.

1922- The first broadcast commercial on radio.It was for a real estate firm Queensboro
Realty lasting ten minutes, and cost $100 dollars. The firm selling suburban
homes in Queens NY immediately did $100,000 worth of business. The business world
took note of this new method of advertising.

1934-Writer Upton Sinclair was nominated for Governor of
California on the Democratic ticket by over half a million votes. This shocked
the California power-elite because Sinclair was a radical whose grass roots
organization EPIC (End Poverty in California) advocated socialist solutions to
the Depression. Even FDR kept his distance from Sinclair.

Powerful forces
enlisted Louis B. Mayer, Irving Thalberg and other Hollywood conservatives to
ensure Sinclair's defeat by creating the first modern negative media campaign.
This included phony newsreels of actors dressed as hobos saying how they're
going to California to sponge off the taxpayers. Walt Disney's lawyer, Gunther
Lessing, demanded Ward Kimball take the "Sinclair for Governor" sign
off his car window.

1963- Dr. Martin Luther King gave his "I Have a
Dream" speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial at the climax of the first
' Poor People's March 'on Washington”. Organizer A. Phillip Randolph conceived
a poor people’s march taking weeks not unlike the Bonus Marchers of 1929. The
sympathetic John F. Kennedy administration prevailed upon them to keep it to
one day to reduce the chance of violence and maximize media exposure.They had planned for 100,000 but they got
400,000. Movie stars like Sidney Poitier, Marlon Brando, James Garner, and
Charlton Heston attended.

1917- Straight Shooting, the first film directed by John
Ford released. Before that Ford did bit parts and stuntwork. He was a Klansman
in Birth of a Nation. Not because he was racist but because it was a paying
extras job. He said later he kept fussing with his white hood that kept
slipping over his eyes while he was trying to ride his horse.

1930- Lon Chaney Sr. died of throat cancer. It was claimed
then that during filming of a remake of The
Unholy Three a wind machine blew an artificial gypsum snowflake into
Chaney's mouth - it caused an irritation that became a tumor.

1955- The first Guinness Book of World Records published.

1950- NBC and General Foods abruptly canceled the hit
television show “the Aldrich Family” when a pamphlet called Red Channels
accused Jean Muir, one of the show’s stars, of being a communist.

1953- The film Roman Holiday introduced a new young actress
from Holland named Audrey Hepburn.

1968- Former master animator Bill Tytla's request to return
to Disney was turned down. The artist who animated Grumpy the Dwarf, Dumbo and
the Devil on Bald Mountain even offered to do a free "trial animation
test" to show he still had it. Disney exec W.H. Anderson wrote him:"
We really have only enough animation for our present staff."

Tytla died later that year.

1990- Guitar great Stevie Ray Vaughan was killed in a helicopter crash outside
Alpine Valley Wisconsin, after an "All Stars of the Blues" show.Stevie Ray took the last remaining seat on
the helicopter, after Eric Clapton got off, claiming he'd rather take a limo
back to Chicago, which was about an hour away.

1868- First practical typewriter
patented by Christopher Scholes. The Remington Company who were famous for
making firearms took up the typewriter and mass produced it. In 1874 Mark Twain
admitted to a friend that he preferred writing on it.

1918- 17 year old Walt Disney dropped
out of high school and faked his parents signature in order to enlist to fight
in World War I. Turned down for his age, he volunteered for the Red Cross.
Assigned to the ambulance corps, he arrived in Europe just as the war was
ending.

1946 - George Orwell published
"Animal Farm". Orwell said he conceived the idea for the novel while
watching out his window a small boy driving a huge draft horse. The horse could
have easily crushed the boy had it the free will, but instead patiently endured
the boys taunts and flicks with a small switch.

1946- First day of shooting on
Jean Cocteau’s film Belle et le Bete, Beauty & the Beast.

1958- First day of shooting on the
Alfred Hitchcock film North By Northwest.

1835- The New York Sun newspaper
ran a story that British astronomer Sir William Herschel, the discoverer of
Neptune, had observed little men living on the surface of the Moon!The story proved false, but it boosted the
sales of the paper.

1970- A young singer named Elton
John did his first US tour, opening at the Troubadour in LA.

1980- The premiere of the Broadway
musical version of the classic movie 42nd Street. In a moment of Broadway
melodrama producer David Merrick came out on stage and startled the cast and
audience by announcing that the director of the play Gower Champion had died
that very day. 42nd Street went on to be a smash hit. The play itself is about
a Broadway director who works himself to death creating a hit musical.

1991- At the Emmy ceremony, comic
Gilbert Gottfried (AFLACK duck, Iago in Aladdin) upset the audience by a flood of masturbation
jokes about Pee Wee Herman. Fox Network apologized the next day.

2001-Beautiful 22 year old R&B
singer Alleiya was killed, when her overloaded charter plane crashed on the
island of Abaco in the Bahamas.

1942- Walt Disney’s film Saludos Amigos received its world premiere in Rio De Janeiro.

1951- Akira Kurosawa’s film Rashomon premiered at the Venice International Film Festival. The film won the Grand Prize and first showed the world that Japanese Cinema was a new force in the film world.

1973- One month after Bruce Lee’s death his last film Enter The Dragon opened in the US to wild acclaim. It renewed interest in the late star and helped spawn the Chinese Martial Arts craze in the US.

1995- Microsoft's Windows 95 introduced.

1997- According to the 1984 James Cameron film The Terminator this was the day the Skynet computer system became self aware, and began the War of the Day of Judgement.

2011- Washington D.C. and much of the east coast was shaken by an earthquake. The first in 121 years. Californians were told not to snicker too much.

2011- Steve Jobs announced he was resigning his positions at Apple, Pixar and Disney due to his failing health.

1926- Screen idol Rudolph Valentino died in a New York
hospital of an infection due to a burst appendix and bleeding ulcer. Today this
condition could be controlled by anti-biotics, but they weren’t invented yet..
Women around the world went mad with grief. From L.A. to Budapest women
committed suicide before his picture. In Japan two women jumped into a volcano
shouting his name.

1715 – Handel’s "Watermusic" premiered on the Thames River to mark celebrations of the Peace ending the War of Spanish Succession.

1906 - 1st Victor Victrola manufactured, using Emile Berliners flat record turntable system. The Victrola was so cheap and easy to use it became standard in many homes and finished off any competition from Thomas Edison’s rival talking cylinder system.
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1882 -Peter Tchaikovsky's
"1812 Overture" premiered in Moscow. The composer said of all his
works the two pieces he liked the least were the 1812 Overture and the
Nutcracker Suite. Overture 1812 was Richard Nixon’s favorite classical piece.

1972- Star Hollywood directors
Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich and William Freidkin announced a
partnership in a new production company called "The Director's
Company". Young punks Martin Scorcese, George Lucas and Steven Speilberg
were also involved. The partnership lasted two years then collapsed.

1977- NASA launched the Voyager 1
probe towards the outer planets of our solar system. Among the things Voyager
discovered was that Jupiter had many more moons than previously thought and had
a ring like Saturn. Part of NASA's program was an explanatory simulation film
done on computer by Jim Blinn in 1980 and 1982. He enlisted the aid of some friends who later became the technology arm of PIXAR. The animation was so smooth and
the graphics so breathtaking it expanded the use of the CGI medium and inspired
a new generation of digital artists.